There are a number of reasons to believe that the future of warfare will look much more like Syria, i.e. states implode from within and then break apart into a number of warring factions, each fighting over territory & resources within the carcass of the state. Actually, most of the bloodiest 20th century conflicts were of this type (eg. Russian & Chinese civil wars, Rwandan genocide & Congo Wars, civil wars in Nigeria/Sudan/Ethiopia), and historically the highest death tolls have usually occurred in civil wars where an empire breaks up or in conquests when a much more developed power invades a less-developed power (eg. Mongol conquests or European conquest of America).
WW2 was a historical anomaly in that it was fought between developed nations. It's an anomaly we pay a lot of attention to, though, because it led to the current international system of American hegemony and history tends to get written by the victors.
A bunch of Syrians (peacefully) protested Assad's power. He started killing people. The protests stayed peaceful for months, but eventually, the protesters got tired of getting killed, and the violence turned into a civil war. That wasn't "induced" by the US.
> Nobody disputes that...
False.
Because major historical powers like Rome, China, Mayans, Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, France, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Britain never fought any wars against other powers that were at their same level of development. Oh, wait, all of them did.
The anomaly is the past two centuries or so, which have been the most peaceful times on record, particularly between major powers. (Since the Napoleonic Wars, the sum total is Crimean War, Mexican-American War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, Spanish-American War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I, Russian Civil War, World War II [noting that there's a lot of related conflicts getting summed up here], Korean War, maybe War of the Pacific and the Russo-Turkish Wars). Compare that to the Early Modern, which is replete with constant conflict on Europe: 18th century alone has Great Northern War, War of Spanish Succession, War of Austrian Succession, Seven Years' War, American Revolution, and the French Revolutionary Wars, all of which were far nastier than the brief wars in the 19th century (save the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
Categorized into great power wars (between well-defined states of roughly equal power levels), civil wars (where a single state breaks up into multiple factions that then fight each other), rebellions (where a state breaks up, but into an asymmetric power balance between one province and the rest of the state), and conquests (where a much more developed power - at least in terms of military technology - invades and destroys a less-developed one) and ordered by death toll, you have:
WW2 (great power)
Mongol conquests (conquest)
Three Kingdoms war (civil)
Qing conquest of Ming (rebellion, against backdrop of civil)
Spanish conquest of Aztecs (conquest)
Taiping rebellion (rebellion)
Second Sino-Japanese war (great power, but against the backdrop of the Chinese Civil War)
An-Lushan rebellion (rebellion)
Germanic wars vs. Rome (effectively a civil war in that Roman territory was breaking up and many of the adversaries were trained in the Roman army, but you can quibble about this)
WW1 (great power)
Conquests of Timur (?)
Dungan Revolt (rebellion)
Chinese Civil War (civil)
Spanish conquest of Incas (conquest)
Reconquista (great power?)
Russian Civil War (civil)
Thirty Years War (civil - breakup of Holy Roman Empire)
Ottoman Wars (great power)
Moorish Wars (great power)
Napoleonic Wars (great power)
Mughal-Maratha Wars (?)
Yellow-Turban Rebellion (rebellion)
Second Congo War (civil)
French Wars of Religion (civil)
Indian Rebellion of 1857 (rebellion)
Hundred Years War (great power)
Vietnam War (civil, but with great power involvement)
Crusades (great power)
Readers can draw the conclusion they like from that data, but to my eyes - if you exclude WW2, civil wars and conquests end up killing far more people and remaking the map more than great power conflicts.You have a strong need to separate out civil wars from great power conflicts, but many of them, particularly the ones that lead to lots of deaths, have very strong international involvement, and the destruction is driven in large part by foreign involvement. The Congo Wars and the Russian Civil War are good examples of this. Beyond that, you basically jump at the opportunity to classify wars as civil wars: the Germanic incursions into the Roman Empire and the Thirty Years' War [1] are in no way civil wars.
Placing importance of wars on the raw numbers of people killed is a bad way to go about things. First off, we have trouble establishing these counts even in modern contexts where sophisticated bureaucracies exist to keep track of everything (these bureaucracies have a way of breaking down in war); historical counts involve a fair amount of guesswork, and especially in list mode, you're not seeing similar methodologies being applied to ensure that the estimates are comparable. Even keeping track of wars with similar methodologies is difficult: why do we roll up all of the 14th century Anglo-French conflicts into the Hundred Years' War, yet insist on keeping World War I, World War II, the Russian Civil War, Second Sino-Japanese War, and the Spanish Civil War all separate instead of a Forty Years' War?
Most importantly, however, is that raw death totals don't reflect the impact of destruction. The deadliest war in US history is not the American Civil War, but King Philip's War, which killed 10% of the population. The Thirty Years' War was hardest in Northern Germany, where it killed about 50% of the people, while World War II only managed to kill 17% of the Poles (and most of that due to the Holocaust). Raw death counts inflate the relative importance of Chinese wars, since the Chinese river plains were historically able to support far larger population densities than in, say, Europe, so conflicts in China necessarily involve more people even at a comparable level of technological sophistication.
[1] For most of its existence, the Holy Roman Empire was not properly a country as we would understand it in our modern terminology. Admittedly, the Habsburgs were trying to reestablish it as a strong centralized state at the time, but the Thirty Years' War was effectively the point at which they gave up. It's more proper to think of the HRE at this point as closer to a 17th century organization akin to the current European Union than the modern United States.
If we're going to fight in 3rd world countries, we need more A-10's and Super Tucano's and less F-35's.
Part of the F-35's justification is that it's supposed be able to go head to head with other 1st world nations airforces.